Drawing Circles Around Smallpox Hospitals: Cartography, Calculation, and Surveillance

Abstract

This chapter looks closely at William Henry Power’s landmark 1881 investigation of “hospital influences” in epidemics, which employed an innovative form of spot map and concluded that the MAB’s Fulham Smallpox Hospital had contributed to an increased risk of smallpox in its vicinity. Although highly controversial at the time, Power’s study came to be considered a “classic” epidemiologic study. Disease maps of this sort gained a pivotal place in the visual culture of public health and exerted a broad influence on debates and struggles over urban epistemology and governability. This chapter links the history of medical cartography with practices of social inspection and examines how disease maps invited the London public to place itself in the position of observer and to see itself through the eye of surveillance.